What remains to be seen is how -- and if -- this attack changes Pakistan's disastrous policies that have given the Taliban and al-Qaeda safe haven inside the country.
"Dinner plans save Pakistan's rulers from hotel bomb attack," from CNN, September 22:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistan's president, prime minister and other Cabinet members were supposed to have been at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad when a massive truck bomb detonated outside, killing 57 and injuring 266, Pakistan's head of the Interior Ministry Rehman Malik said Monday.
Malik said their planned dinner was changed at the last minute, although did not say how far in advance it had been planned.
The Speaker of the House, Fahmida Mirza, had planned the event for ministers, the president, their guests and various foreign dignitaries.
But at the last minute, President Asif Ali Zardari asked that the event be transferred to the Prime Minister's compound, Malik told reporters during a handover service for Czech Ambassador Ivo Zdarek, who died in the blast.
On Sunday Malik called the massive blast "the biggest attack, volume-wise" in Pakistan in seven years, based on the quantity -- 600kg -- and type of explosives used.
Two American military personnel who worked for the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad were among those killed, the U.S. military said. A Lithuanian Pakistan was also among the fatalities, police superintendent Sheikh Zubair told CNN Sunday. The injured included 11 foreigners, Malik said.
No arrests have been made in connection with the attack. But Malik said suspicion is falling on militants in Pakistan's tribal regions.
"I am not in a position to tell you who has done it, but (in) all the previous investigations, all the roads have gone to South Waziristan," he said Sunday.
South Waziristan is one of seven agencies of Pakistan's tribal areas where Taliban and al Qaeda militants are active.
But Amir Mohammad, an aide to leader of the Pakistani Taliban Baitullah Mehsud, said he shared the country's grief and was not involved, The Associated Press reported.
Saturday's massive blast left a nearly 60-foot-wide (18 meters) crater, which was 24 feet (7m) deep, Malik said. It also caused a natural gas leak that set the top floor of the five-story, 258-room hotel on fire, police said. The blaze quickly engulfed the entire structure.
"Pakistan's president, prime minister and other Cabinet members were supposed to have been at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad "
I would appear that there are Taliban moles within the Pakistan Government and they definitely are not the type of people the Pakistani government should be supporting...
of course , a second thought occurs to me...the Pakistani government official were used as bait to make sure the US CIA and other military types would be at the Marriot....it is interesting the Government officials did not show....
No arrests have been made in connection with the attack. But Malik said suspicion is falling on militants in Pakistan's tribal regions.
Since when is Islamabad in the tribal regions? If "militants" from those areas are able to get into the capital, there is your problem. Why aren't the tribal regions cordoned off? If they're so rugged and (presumably) so inaccessible, doesn't that mean there are few ways to get in and out? How difficult can it be to restrict traffic?
Supposedly Osama and company are reduced to messenger traffic instead of advanced communication, in order to keep their locations from being identified.
How difficult would it be to further restrict communications within those areas, by such means as banning satellite telephony, preventing militants from communicating with allies in major cities? Can the networks be shut down?
This is why I do not lose sleep over what happens to the Pakistanis, as the government is infested with terrorist sympathizers.The Pakistani government has made a deal with the devil in their "agreements" with AQ, the Taliban and "tribal" leaders and now they and reaping the whirlwind.If the Pakistani government was serious they could make life hell for those in the "tribal" areas.
The American government, and the more credulous and dutiful part of the America press, keeps calling Pakistan a "close ally." The Pakistani government, and all of the Pakistani press, keeps describing America as an o'erweening and arrogant country that should keep on -- so it is tacitly assumed -- shoveling vast amounts of aid, as it has for so long, into Pakistan, but should not dare to "infringe Pakistan's sovereignty" nor to make any demands on Pakistan that might actually have a real effect on the revived Taliban given safe haven, like Al Qaeda, in so many parts of Pakistan with the connivance of many in the Pakistani military. , the still-safe-havened Al Qaeda.
We call them "allies." They call us...something else. And the money keeps moving, in Pakistan as in so many other places, from Infidels to Muslims. And meanwhile, the fabulously rich Arab states of the Gulf are never asked, not once, to contribute to the "fight against Al Qaeda" and the Taliban. It was Saudi Arabia, it was the U.A.E., that were the only states, aside from Pakistan itself, to recognize the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and it was from those countries that financial as well as diplomatic support came to the Taliban, the first open supporters of Al Qaeda. Yet the American government appears to believe, wrongly, that it cannot demand that if Pakistan wants money, it get it by going hat-in-hand to Saudi Arabia, to the U.A.E., and if the latter want to show, in some small fashion, that they really are for "stability" in Pakistan and for a "war on Al Qaeda" it is they, presumably, who have a greater stake than anyone in paying for this so-called "war on terrorism." Their refusal to offer such support, as they swim merrily ion their unmerited trillions, uncle-scrooges without that cartoon character's charm, and the refusal of the American government, as it drowns in debt, to stop the vast expenditures on aid to Muslim lands, that does nothing to tamp down the power of Islam.
Indeed, American aid to Pakistan, as to other places (Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, the "Palestinian" or Arab-occupied "West Bank"), is aid that has the very opposite effect of what the far too-generous American government, lavishing such aid because those who make policy are too set in their ways, too ill-informed, too lazy, too unimaginative, to figure out the best way to weaken the Camp of Islam (and that first requires the understanding that such a "Camp of Islam" exists). Aid from Infidels merely allows such states to avoid catastrophe, but catastrophe, in those states, is not necessarily a bad thing. We want Muslims -- and non-Muslims too, who need to understand what Islam brings -- to be forced to confront,as a first step, the political and economic failures of their own polities, that we can show -- and show quite easily -- are the result of Islam itself. For Islam, which discourages individual effort, which promotes the fatalism (or "Oriental fatalism" as it used to be called) or, more exactly, what I have termed inshallah-fatalism, does not encourage entrepreneurial flair, nor hard work, nor even punctuality, a sine qua non for economic activity as that is understood in the West. And Islam also encourages a habit of submission, to Allah, to the imam, to the collective, a yours-not-to-reason-why attitude, that has obvious effects, strengthened by the figure of that despot Muhammad, who lay down the law himself, or rather would hastily appear to have been instructed by Allah himself, and then appear with a new ad-hoc ruling that, no matter what the occasion, always managed to coincide with whatever it was Muhammad the man wished at that moment to be the case. Democracy is unnatural to Islam; despotism, or at least the powerful Ruler, comes much more naturally. There are dynasties -- the sherifians of Morocco, the Al-Saud, the Al-Sabah, the Al-Thani, the Al-Maktoums, the Al-thisses and thatses. And then there are the so-called non-monarchies, or "Arab Republics," which also have their despots and their dynasties, including Jordan (which has had only Hashemites since it was created by the British out of Eastern Palestine as "the Emirate of Trans-Jordan"), Egypt (where Mubarak rules, and hopes to be followed by his son), Tunisia (Ben Ali following Bourguiba in the one-party state), the generals in the FLN line who have run Algeria since the French left in 1962), Libya (where Khaddafy has been in power since his coup in 1969 at a time when King Idris was out of the country), Syria (where Alawite despots control, in what has so far been a two-man Assad dynasty) and Iraq (where, since 1958, one coup followed another, until the arrival of Saddam Hussein gave the country its murderous “stability.”)
In non-Arab Muslim lands – where ethnicity works against, rather than reinforces, Islam -- the situation is not quite so uniformly despotic. In the one Muslim country where Islam has been systematically constrained since 1924, that is Turkey, something like “democracy” has come into being. Iran, an authoritarian state that was never democratic, nonetheless under the secularizing Shah was far more reflective of enlightened – nota bene that adjective -- popular will than under the totalitarian theocracy of the ayatollahs and mullahs. In Lebanon, where the Christians were until recent decades a majority, and are still powerful, and have had a civilizing influence on the local Muslims, and even in Bangladesh, where for a while, as a reaction to the behavior of the Pakistani Army during the 1970-71 war, and to its local collaborators, the fanatical Muslim razakars, and even because nearly a third of the population was originally non-Muslim (though their percentage of the population has, as a result of intolerable persecution, gone steadily down to about 8%), a certain “moderate” strain allowed for democracy. And in Indonesia, the inheritance of Dutch rule, and the nationalist leaders who grew up under that rule, and the presence of Hindus (in Bali) and Christians (including many Chinese) acted as a check on Islam as a political force, and to the extent that this succeeded, this made possible whatever “democracy” Indonesia has enjoyed. The existence of a few enlightened and idiosyncratic Muslims with a popular following – Wahid comes immediately to mind – also has had its effect. In Malaysia, the Muslims have had to take into account that nearly 50% of the population remains non-Muslim, even though Muslims have managed to push through – “democratically” – the Bumiputra system that is simply a disguised tax, or Jizyah, placed on more successful non-Muslims.
The ways in which Islam works in favor of despotism, and works naturally against democracy is ultimately based on Islam’s view that individual men do not matter, that they are merely part of a collective, the Umma, and must not exercise their individual will, but keep always in mind the needs, the image, of that collective. Western democracy – with its great solicitousness for individual rights – is based on the belief that a government is legitimate to the extent that it reflects the will of those governed. Islam locates the legitimacy of government in the Islamic nature of the Ruler – if he is a despot, even a cruel despot, but remains a Muslim, then he is to be obeyed. It is only if he is or can be depicted as non-Muslim in his behavior, even as an Infidel, that he is to be rebelled against. The rules in the West are universalist; in Muslim lands, the rules are always in terms of what is Islam, and what is not-Islam.
Pakistan is not only not an ally of the West, but can never be such an ally, whatever the smylers and the husain-haqqanis suggest or imply otherwise. Pakistan can not be counted on, and it never should have been seen in the rosy glow that the Bush Administration conferred upon it, deeply misled by Musharraf and deeply misunderstanding of how deeply Islamic is, and that includes its zamindars and generals. Pakistan During World War II, when Europe was held by the Nazis, Allied bombers more than once, more than a thousand times in fact, bombed targets that ended up killing innocent civilians in the German-occupied lands. There was one case where, during Operation Market Garden, not Gestapo headquarters, but a children’s hospital was hit in the Netherlands, and hundreds of children died. But the response of the Dutch Resistance was clear: keep on coming, don’t stop, not even for a minute. There was no one who did not wish the Allies to do what they were doing. Compare that attitude to the fury, the rage, on the handful of occasions when the Americans, who take great precautions, hit the wrong target, or do not hit the wrong target but nonetheless are hysterically accused of doing so (and it has happened again and again), in Afghanistan, or just inside Pakistan, or in Iraq. Again and again we read reports of locals who claimed to have been well-disposed toward the Americans, for saving them from Saddam Hussein, or from the Taliban, but who, because of a single incident, are now prepared to “kill all Americans.” This attitude is explicable: the “friendship” with Americans is skin-deep, covering the deep inculcated hostility toward all Infidels that no amount of road-and-bridge-and-school building, no amount of “liberation” from a despot (Saddam Hussein) or fanatics (the Taliban) will, in the long run, undo.
Americans and other Infidels should study the ultimate source of the threat to them: Islam itself, the “ideology” of Islam. Instead of squandering money, men, materiel, in the endless pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp, a disappearing mirage in the desert of Islam, to give Muslims prosperity by lavishing Western aid upon them (when the source of their poverty is Islam itself) and to attempt to transplant democracy to stony soil, or desert soil, where it will not take and where the watering -- with Infidel blood --- is even more cruelly wasteful than those golf courses built in Abu Dhabi, and unnaturally kept up at fantastic expense.
It makes far more sense to refuse to rescue Muslims from the conditions that Islam naturally causes. Instead of doing still more, do far less to support such places, including Pakistan. Do not listen the siren songs of those who so smoothly explain away the betrayals by our “ally” Pakistan, by the obvious unwillingness of the Pakistani military – which, of course, is peopled by Muslims, whether of the more-fanatical Zia ul-Haq variety, or of the slightly-less fanatical Musharraf or Khayani variety, still operate in a mental universe bounded by Islam, which means they can never be our allies, never be our true friends. There are those sly, Anglophone, altogether plausible Pakistanis – the current ambassador, Husain Haqqani, who managed not only to become head of the International Relations Program at Boston University (where he promptly hired, and promoted, a fellow Pakistani apologist for Islam, who is still in place at B.U.)—who will keep saying, all over official Washington,
that the Americans should “give us the tools” and “we will do the job.” By “the tools,” of course, the smooth husain-haqqanis of this world mean money, and airplanes, and weaponry of all kinds, and more money.
Do not give them what they want.
"Do not give them what they want.
Posted by: Hugh "
100%
It makes far more sense to refuse to rescue Muslims from the conditions that Islam naturally causes. Instead of doing still more, do far less to support such places, including Pakistan.
Hugh
You are absolutely correct. Also, at one time, we had leaders that understood this. When these leaders of the past would see the need to help weaken Islamics, they would help the Sunnis or Shites, whichever needed the help, so that they would keep fighting each other. This was a relatively inexpensive way to keep them weak and in check. Those days are gone and our leaders now falsely believe that they can be friends of Islam.
Were the highest levels of the Pakistani govt. tipped off to this attack? Why exactly did they make those last minute change in their plans? Something smells in Pakistan. (Actually, all of Pakistan smells, some parts just smell even worse.)
jsla
I normally don't buy into conspiracy theories, but in this case, I'm with you - isn't it a rather curious co-incidence that the Zardari changed their plans at the 11th hour and got saved?
This new regime - both Zardari and Sharief - are both on the side of the Jihadis, just as they are more obsessed with US attacks on al Qaeda targets in Waziristan than on al Qaeda activities in Islamabad.
Why doesn't someone announce that the same group will be going to Bin Laden's cave for Friday prayer on Sept 26th? When the same group drives a truck into the hole we might get lucky. Just follow the explosion. If we don't get lucky at least we'll know where Osama had been staying.